Overview of GVRP

NOTE:

GVRP and MVRP are mutually exclusive which can not be configured at the same time.

To manually create or delete VLANs for all the devices in a large and complex network, the workload will be very heavy, and it is very easy to make a configuration mistakenly for network administrator. In this case, users can complete the VLAN configuration through GVRP dynamic VLAN creation function.

GARP VLAN Registration Protocol (GVRP) is an application of Generic Attribute Registration Protocol (GARP) that is used to propagate and register VLAN configuration information on interfaces among devices. After the device enables GVRP, it sends the local VLAN configuration information to other devices, and also receives VLAN configuration information from other devices, so as to dynamically updates local VLAN configuration information to keep consistent with other devices in the network, which greatly reduces the VLAN configuration work for network administrator.

When the network topology changes, GVRP re-propagates and registers VLAN configuration information according to the new topology, so as to make VLAN configuration information on all the GVRP devices be updated synchronously with the network topology.

GVRP Timer

NOTE:

It is highly recommended to KEEP the default configuration of GVRP Timers to ensure the system and network stability. Modifying timers to inappropriate values might cause an imbalance in the operation of GVRP.

The supported GVRP timers are shown in the following table.

Timer Name

Function

Description

Join Timer

It is used to control the sending of Join messages.

To ensure that join messages are transmitted to other participants, an MRP participant waits for the specified period of the join timer before sending a join message.

If a JoinIn message is received within one Join timer time, a second Join message is not sent; if not received, another Join message is sent.

Leave Timer

It is used to control the VLAN registrar state machine change.

The Leave timer is started when a Leave message or LeaveAll message is received on the interface. The VLAN registrar state machine waits in the Leave All state before transiting to the MT state before the Leave timer expires.

LeaveAll Timer

It is used to specify the frequency with which the Leave All state machine generates Leave All messages.

When GVRP is enabled, the device starts the LeaveAll timer. When the timer expires, the device sends a LeaveAll message externally, which is used to deregister all VLAN attributes on the GVRP device in the network.

GVRP edge-switch

For the GVRP access switch connected the host, when this switch forms a loop with other devices, it causes the GVRP messages received by this device to be forwarded cyclically over the same set of links, which consumes bandwidth and causes overutilization. To solve this problem, users can configure the following command to enable GVRP edge-switch function on the host-side switch, then the edge switch will not forward the received GVRP messages.

admin@PICOS# set protocols gvrp edge-switch true
admin@PICOS# commit